Thomson

It’s a heck of a way to run a pre-election campaign. On the eve of an expected election, politicians usually spend their time playing up good news, downplaying the bad, shaking hands and kissing babies.

Thomson: Abrupt changes rid Wildrose of policy 'distractions'

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith

Photograph by: Jason Franson
, The Canadian Press

RED DEER - Perhaps a leopard can’t change its spots, but it seems a wild rose can shed its thorns.

In advance of the fall sitting of the legislature that starts Monday, Alberta’s Wildrose party spent the weekend removing some of the most prickly policies from its handbook.

Call it a thornectomy — and it wasn’t as painful as it sounds.

In fact, it was a remarkably quick and easy process for delegates to the party’s annual convention in Red Deer.

Most of the 500 delegates knew exactly what they had to do going into the convention. As party leader Danielle Smith told them in her opening speech, “Here and now, let’s show Albertans that we have learned the lessons we needed to learn; that we now have the experience we needed to grow and prepare. Let’s show them that we are ready to lead this great province.”

In other words, let’s drop policies that make us look like angry Socreds and let’s adopt new policies so our critics can no longer paint us as a bunch of homophobic climate-change deniers.

The party wants to remove the “distractions” and focus on issues such as balanced budgets, open government and better health care to attract Albertans who are fed up with the government but were afraid of the Wildrose’s social conservatism.

So, in the space of three hours Saturday morning party delegates pruned the infamous “firewall” policies that had called for Alberta to withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan, collect its own income taxes and form its own provincial police force. They are no longer calling for an end to the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

And to demonstrate the party is inclusive, delegates endorsed an exhaustively worded motion to “defend the rights and freedoms of all people” regardless of “race, religious belief, colour, gender, physical disability, mental disability, age, ancestry, place of origin, marital status, source of income, family status or sexual orientation of that person or class of persons.”

The needle in this verbal haystack is “sexual orientation.” As Wildrose MLA Rob Anderson said, inadvertently channelling gay pride parades around the world, the Wildrose is “loud and proud” in its defence of minorities.

Delegates also made a point of addressing an issue that did them harm in the last election — climate change. Until this weekend, the Wildrose party didn’t have a policy on global warming, presumably because most members, including the leader, didn’t believe it existed.

Some of them still don’t. As one delegate said at the microphone on Saturday, “global warming is the biggest scam in human history.”

But Smith, who was at one point a denier and more recently a skeptic, is now something of a believer. “I accept that climate change is a reality, as do our members,” Smith told reporters on Friday. “I accept that there’s a human influence on it.”

Even if they don’t accept the science themselves, delegates were reminded by the party’s leadership that Alberta’s customers want the province to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

So, delegates dutifully passed resolutions to reduce emissions in line with national and international protocols.

However, the sincerity of the party’s conversion hit a snag when reporters discovered Wildrose MLA Jason Hale had booked a well-known climate change denier as guest speaker at a party fundraiser next month. When the story broke, party officials scrambled to say it had all been a mistake and the speaker had been cancelled. Hale said he simply hadn’t paid close enough attention to notice who had been booked to speak by party volunteers.

It was a laughable explanation that reinforced the fact that the Wildrose’s reversal over climate change is so abrupt and unexpected it’s giving party workers whiplash.

The Progressive Conservatives are gleefully calling the Wildrose’s new climate change policies insincere. In fact, the PCs were so keen to ridicule the Wildrose that they sent cabinet minister Cal Dallas to the convention hotel where he held a news scrum in the lobby to call the Wildrosers hypocrites. It was an astonishing move, not because of what Dallas had to say but because the PC are so obviously scared of the Wildrose that they took the step, unprecedented in Alberta politics, of sending a cabinet minister to stalk an opposition party’s convention.

The Wildrose has two years until the next election to convince Albertans that what it did on the weekend was not simply cynical politics. Based on the PCs’ jittery reaction this past weekend, it would seem that by removing some of its most prickly issues, the Wildrose has become an even bigger thorn in the government’s side.